7 Things Every Parent and Educator Should Know About Learning Challenges
When your bright child struggles in school, it can be VERY frustrating and confusing.
In this phone call, Jill discusses what she wishes every parent and professional knew about learning problems.
This is NOT about criticizing, but rather educating and informing parents to help understand what is happening to their child.
Click here to listen to the phone call recording
1. Attention problems are often a symptom and not the real issue.
The most noticeable thing is that a student is not paying attention. The conclusion that people jump to is that they have Attention Deficit Disorder. However the majority of the time the student has another learning issue.
The vast majority of Stowell Learning Center students that have learning disabilities also have attention issues, but not necessarily Attention Deficit Disorder. In most cases the attention issues is a by-product of a more prominent learning disability.
Often times it is a processing issue. If a student has a difficult time with auditory processing, memory, or reasoning/logic, they may have to work much harder just to keep up with students who are more skilled in these areas.
Often times, as a result, the students with these learning disabilities are viewed as lazy, when the reality is they are working very hard, but don’t possess the same processing skill level as the rest of their peers.
These students are left exhausted from trying to focus for long periods of time, and often from this exhaustion seem not to be paying attention.
2. Try harder is a dirty word.
When we are under stress we tend not to use all of our mental resources. Students with learning challenges are under a great deal of stress and are already expending vast amounts of effort just to keep up. Telling a student to, “Try harder,” can actually switch them off. Trying too hard can actually cause a student not to use all of their brain’s resources.
Just do your best. You got this part exactly right. Positive reinforcement and focusing on what they can do will help them use all of their resources.
3. A learning problem is not a about motivation.
A lack of motivation is often a symptom of a learning disability, not the root issue itself. Think of something that is incredibly difficult for you. How motivated are you to spend your entire day working on that?
It is not that students aren’t motivated, it’s that they simply do not possess the skills needed to do the job.
Change the focus from what they can’t do, to what they can and have done. Give them positive feedback on what they have done, and encourage that behavior. Make students feel glad that they did it.
4. Respect the effort.
Learning disabilities are very painful. Kids spend 6+ hours a day in school before coming home to 1, 2, or more hours of homework. That is an enormous amount of time for students with learning disabilities to spend expending that kind of effort, and many of them are embarrassed about having learning issues, and expend even more effort on top of that trying to hide them.
It is critical to celebrate each success with them. They are trying very hard and need to know that their effort is not unnoticed. Even small successes need to be acknowledged; getting a D instead of an F on a test is an important step in the right direction.
Instead of constant correction, focus on what you want more of. Encourage the behavior that is good, and you want to be prominent.
5. Look at the whole child.
Learning is like a ladder, and reading/academics is near the top of that ladder. So if a student is having difficulty in reading, the issue may not be resolved with reading and comprehension skills, but with underlying learning skills. If we know that there is trouble at the top of the ladder, we need to look at the skills underneath that are not supporting easy learning. The symptoms are on the surface, but the solutions come from underneath.
6. Coping is not the final answer.
Traditionally, it has been thought that learning disabilities are just something you have to live with and struggle through. However, modern research is showing that the brain is capable of making changes, and with the right training can make permanent changes to deal with learning issues.
Compensation is not always a bad thing, but it is a not the final solution.
7. In order to solve a learning problem, the underlying processing skills must be addressed.
Traditional tutoring is curriculum focused, and works mostly at the top of the ladder. Stowell Learning Center attacks the weaker underlying skills that are at the root of the problem. This way they have a stronger foundation for learning, which includes academics.
These learning skills include memory, attention, auditory and visual processing, language processing, reasoning processing, and motor skills. If one of these skills is weak it can affect the rest of them.
Research shows that it is possible to improve these skills through retraining the brain. As an athlete trains their body for competition, the brain can be trained for learning by working on each of these individual skills.
